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Subject Area: Political Theory
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

TO URIAH FORREST. - John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 8 (Letters and State Papers 1782-1799) [1853]

Edition used:

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 8.

Part of: The Works of John Adams, 10 vols.

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TO URIAH FORREST.

Quincy, 13 May, 1799.

I received on Saturday your friendly letter of 28 April, and I thank you for it, and should be very happy if it were in my power to comply with your advice, not so much on account of any real public utility, as in compliance with what you call the public sentiment. I have reason to believe, however, that this sentiment is chiefly in Philadelphia and Georgetown. “The people elected me to administer the government,” it is true, and I do administer it here at Quincy, as really as I could do at Philadelphia. The Secretaries of State, Treasury, War, Navy, and the Attorney-General, transmit me daily by the post all the business of consequence, and nothing is done without my advice and direction, when I am here, more than when I am in the same city with them. The post goes very rapidly, and I answer by the return of it, so that nothing suffers or is lost.

Your speculative conjectures concerning the views of parties on the chief seat of the synagogue, are founded in human nature, in attentive observation of life, and on actual facts. What then? They give me no anxiety.

Mrs. Adams, it is true, is better; but she is still in a state so delicate, and has such returns of that dreadful disorder, which kept her on the brink of the grave almost all the last summer, that it would be a presumptuous imprudence, little less criminal than deliberate suicide, for her to attempt to go one hundred miles south of this latitude, before the violent heat of summer shall be passed.1

John Adams.

[1 ]In absenting himself from the seat of government during the recess of Congress, Mr. Adams did no more than his predecessor, General Washington. There can be little doubt that the habit of cabinet officers assuming responsibility, and consulting with persons outside, to counteract the action of the President, when not agreeable, grew out of this practice. A remarkable instance of it in Washington’s time is found in the case of the nomination of Mr. Rutledge to be Chief Justice. See Gibbs’s Federal Administrations, vol. i. p. 219, 220.